Quote:
Originally Posted by JulieJ08
Well, to be honest, I have a fantasy that the right man will come along, who can see past all my crap into the real me, and make everything all better - but that is of course nonsense.
Just so you know, Julie. It's actually
not nonsense for everybody. I didn't flirt often, occasionally in high school I did. But mostly I was always oblivious to when I guy was genuinely interested. Mostly because I didn't have a lot of confidence, I wasn't pretty, and I didn't really consider myself to be a catch. As I got older, my life seemed to spiral out of control. I was making decisions because I knew my mother would approve of them but I was deciding to do things that I didn't want to do. I felt like I was useless, wasting my life, and was incredibly depressed. While I loved the me inside, nobody got to see that me because I was always walking on eggshells trying to please everybody else. Trying to be the good daughter, the good employee, the good student, the good friend. And somewhere in all that mess, my dreams and hopes and desires kept getting shoved further and further to the wayside. I actually met my husband at the lowest point in my life. He'd been coming through my line at the shoppette where I worked for six months, buy random things and flirting with me, trying to get the courage up to ask me out. I never noticed. When he gave me his number and offered to take me out to dinner so I could relax (I was particularly stressed that day 'cause I was pulling an 8 hour night shift after taking two finals that day) it took me two weeks to screw up any kind of courage to talk to him.
I ended up giving him my number one night after I'd had a huge argument with my mother who was trying to tell me who I could and could not be friends with at 22. I happened to be restocking the liquor that evening and realized that a large reason I'd never tried alcohol up to that point was that I was terrified that if I did, I'd get drunk enough to do something terribly irreversible. I walked home in tears over the realization of how miserable I was. And along the way, my phone rang. DH and I talked for a good five hours that night and, work and deployments aside, we've been pretty inseparable ever since. More importantly, I am finally happy.
All because he did see past all my crap, he did see the real me, and he did make it better by letting me be the real me and loving me because of it (the real me), not in spite of it. Not that everybody is this lucky. I know that. I'm just saying sometimes, those things you read about in books and see in romantic comedy/dramas do actually happen in real life.